by Scott Solomon
When your spouse isn’t disappointed when a babysitter fails to show up.
When your spouse gives the name of a dependable babysitter to someone else.
When your spouse refuses to block the kids from hosting weekend sleepovers, thereby blocking the privacy required for sexual intercourse. Continue reading
by Virginia Laurie
He was lovely then. A ruffled parakeet. We were crisp as carrot sticks and spent our days sweeping peanut shells off the bar floor. In May he called me a bouquet and took me to a field of sunflowers. Under their unrelenting chins, he sliced me in half like a diorama. There was thatch threaded through the belt-loops of my jeans. I shook like a frog standing up.
By July, I stood up with outsized force, marveling at the ache and the strength of my quadriceps. He was still a bird. Mouth an arrow. In August, there were pillows and I rested around him. He was kind, then, and grateful for me. He kissed my nose, nibbled my earrings. At night he took the trash out. He drove me home. Once he asked me where I’d go if I escaped this city. The sun was bright that day, the pavement smug, and this confused me. I told him I just wanted to be there, with him, in that moment. He left me then; I could sense it. His lips curled then flattened— a shallow rip. Then everything was almost the same. Right, he said. Me too. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Franz Jørgen Neumann
The drives to Clayfield used to take only a few hours, back when Beth and Mira visited their husbands once a month. Now, nearly at the end of Dennis and Dylan’s eight-year sentences, neither woman lives in the same town anymore, and they must rise early in order to manage the trip to Clayfield in a day.
Beth picks up her daughter-in-law before dawn, the sky an ocher-to-indigo gradient that reminds Beth of the interior of a decorative bowl she keeps on her dining table. The ceramic piece holds peeked-at bills, house keys, coins and buttons, a matchbook, and whatever else can be emptied from a pocket. Here, that same gradient is uninterrupted, at least in the eastern sky.
Filed under Fiction
by Elizabeth Fergason
My husband Harry and I are on vacation. It’s been a difficult year so we’re giving ourselves a little time off from the pressures of home. Our two daughters stayed behind with a sitter. The girls are three and five and they need a break as much as anyone. A break from our recent tensions, our troubles. Of course, our girls aren’t happy we’ve left them. Children never are. Ada threw herself up into my arms and clung to me the way kudzu clings to a tree. Anna stood at my feet, both hands clamped tightly on my leg.
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 